Or, as a commenter on an article about New Mexico State University’s football team puts it, “I will never understand fans from these terrible academic/athletic schools that need to have their teams competing on the highest level just to have their brains beat in.”

Let NMSU stand for dozens of American universities allowing themselves to bleed out as institutions for the sake of big-time football.

Let us once more, on this blog, attempt to understand the masochism that insists – against the simple sanity of one’s own university president, and a state senator – that hurling your expensive team against opponents who will always beat you by ten, twenty, thirty, forty points is a good thing.

I don’t want you to think that anyone from NMSU actually goes to these games. I mean, a few people do, but for most in the NMSU community, group psychosis apparently has its limits. Most people there prefer not to purchase pricey tickets in order to watch the players for their school get their brains bashed in.

At the same time, though, enough NMSU people want to get seasonally excited about new coaches and paradigms and shit that they refuse to let the president and the state senator divert football money toward, uh, education. An anti-intellectual school in an anti-intellectual state, NMSU’s thing is to sit on its ass being stupid while its team gets brained. Our purpose is to figure out why this is.

It’s not the spectacle of the brain bashing itself, since few attend the games. If attendance were good, our problem would be solved: We love gore, and the NMSU football team guarantees it. But people avert their eyes.

Since total massive loss is equally guaranteed, could a campy delectation of failure itself have set in? Are the denizens of NMSU Wildean rascals…?

No. They are sincere, ever-hopeful, dog-like fans.

Here’s the best I can do. The Buddha speaks always of compassion, and what’s going on at NMSU is a communal exemplification of this primary virtue. The hopelessly broken – ever freshly broken – body of this football team exteriorizes for an entire community the first noble truth of human suffering. The team is a precious sacrificial vessel through which, ritualistically, NMSU attains not intellectual but spiritual enlightenment.

… (he wrote me once to ask whether one should be drunk when reading Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano), is the author of the notorious, and apparently very funny, Fake Steven Knapp parody Twitter account (Knapp is George Washington University’s president).

UD says apparently because she has not read Hunter’s parody; but she vividly remembers him as a rough-and-tumble class presence who would likely have the knack for this sort of thing. The Washington Post wrote about Hunter last year.

Anyway, he’s looking to pass the thing on to a new Twitterer (he feels it’s time for him to stop), and, in a badly written article (“he’s ready to give up the comedic reigns and hand the torch over to a new, fitting replacement”), In the Capital spreads the word about Hunter’s search for a replacement.

… is currently being sued for about three times what it lost by investing in its much-honored ex-trustee Bernard Madoff’s fund.

It’s not easy to keep up with the financial and sexual scandals at Yeshiva University, so don’t try. UD will do it for you.

“Canadian medical schools have some explaining to do.”

A recent study reveals practically non-existent conflict of interest policies at many med schools there.

Northern Ontario School of Medicine takes pride of place, having apparently zero meaningful conflict of interest policies, but the main point is clear: In common with some med schools in the United States, ghostwriting, as well as general corporate influence in the classroom and lab, is rampant up north.

No, there are no alternatives; none at all. The outgoing president of obscure Nicholls University (big-time athletics was going to put it on the map, but …) reviews the athletics-generated academic fraud plus APR-score penalties that marked his term in office. (The article is behind a paywall.)

Hulbert complains that “it is hard to fight battles with a state government that takes money away from higher education.” But Hulbert doesn’t mean higher education; he means athletics facilities. He’s upset with the state because it won’t fund athletics facilities.

President Hulbert does not grasp the distinction between athletic facilities and educational facilities.

So far. But as the humanities dean at Tunisia’s University of Manouba goes on to note, the Salafists remain a very serious threat. They’re after full veiling (note the photo that accompanies the linked article) and full segregation of female university students. The “University of Manouba [has become] a battleground between fundamentalist Muslims intent on turning Tunisia into an Islamic state and secular forces trying to maintain the country’s existing constitutional rights and legal system.” It’s an ugly fight, a protracted struggle for democracy against the forces of violent reaction.

A few months ago, enraged at the dean’s defense of democratic principles, a Salafist mob showed up at Manouba.

Carrying the black flag of the salafists and shouting “Allahu Akbar,” they demanded that the dean come forward for retribution.

Kazdaghli was watching from his office window when Khaoula Rachidi, a young woman majoring in French literature, climbed a wall and reached to tear down the salafist flag. She was tossed to the ground by a large, bearded man, but her bravery inspired her fellow students to swarm the parapet and run the Tunisian flag back up the pole.

“It was a woman who stirred them into action,” says Kazdaghli. “The men had been standing around, watching what was happening, but as soon as a woman threw herself into the fray, they woke up and remembered who they were.”

Kazdaghli on the niqab:

“Our métier demands communication,” he says. “Confidence is reciprocal. I have to know with whom I am speaking. Women can travel to the university and enter the gates wearing their niqabs, but in the classroom and during exams they have to show their faces.”

Even something as simple as taking attendance or confirming the identity of someone sitting for an exam requires exposure. When Kazdaghli’s office was sacked, he had no way of recognizing the two black-robed figures who were throwing his papers on the floor. Only when they yelled that they were the victims of unfair disciplinary procedures was he able to identify these two out of the university’s 27,000 students.

“I can’t have two kinds of students in class, those with whom I can communicate, and those with whom I can’t. This is an important principle, that people have equal access to knowledge.”

… admissions standards.

UD often finds poetry in the comments section of articles about big-time sports. This morsel appears after an article that has Urban Meyer, doting dad of Aaron Hernandez and fellow troubled tots at the University of Florida, sermonizing about how we’re all being terribly judgmental and “irresponsible” to recall Urban’s crime-clogged time at that school. How dare everyone suggest, in light of Hernandez’s murder charges, that Meyer’s recruitment and retention policies at UF somehow enabled Hernandez in his life of crime!

Like Jim Tressel, Urban Meyer is a man of God.

********************

When cornered, hide behind God.

When truly cornered, hide behind the little women.

… down by the Riverside.

A UC Riverside professor looks at the very simple, very stark numbers and comes to the obvious conclusion. Time to lay your burdens down.

… UCR’s athletic program is costing students $3.3 million dollars (2011), and the university $8.4 million dollars.

Ticket sales? $96,322, or well under 1% of the program’s cost.

Contributions? $623,561, or about 5% of the program’s cost.

In the last five years, UCR has seen large academic budget cuts, furloughs, on-and-off freezes on hiring, a huge rise in temporary faculty, and ongoing cuts in staff. Student advisors, for example, handle 400 to 600, or even more, students each. Yet athletic spending never stopped growing, and the university is now spending over $11m annually of state and student funds, according to the NCAA’s figures, on athletics — and that’s before the costs constructing and operating a new facility.

… [T]he NCAA as a whole is mired in scandal at a time when most universities don’t make back more than a fraction of what they spend on Division I (see Rutgers for examples of both), and big-ticket athletics is getting more and more costly every year. When staff has to ration their services to students, when faculty have to pay for their own office telephone lines, and when students have to pay more and more every year, the ever-rising additional cost of participating in Division I rather than Division II seems like a luxury we simply can’t afford.

That scandal thing is important. It’s rarely mentioned when people talk about what big-time sports are doing to this university or that, when they talk about specific dollar costs here and particular academic frauds there. This professor reminds us that we should never forget, as we focus upon the latest Penn State, that the largest picture here involves a lucrative, fully corrupt, and fully cynical industry centered in the NCAA.

Indeed, Americans are well on their way to fashioning some of their universities after the even more cynical and corrupt professional sports organizations.

Look at the University of Georgia, which will almost certainly choose a new president with the same total-insider commitment to the NCAA as the last one had. The University of Georgia, whose post-tailgate filth routinely destroys the campus and really who gives a shit.

I mean, few people on campus give a shit; when sports is all you care about, the despoiling of an academic institution by gallons of piss left after thousands of drunks careen back into their cars after games is nothing. So what.

Yet there is a larger world out there, watching this; and, of course, every year, as the stakes get higher and things get more corrupt, the scandal-factor grows. UD has predicted that in not too many years coaches will on some campuses be promoted to university president – an obvious move, an obvious acknowledgement of their financial, institutional, and political power. Academics at such places will become even more laughable than they already are; coaching salaries will soar; violent players – now treated not as demi-gods but as gods – will get even more difficult to handle.

Mild warning shots of the sort we’re getting from people like this UCR professor will be ignored, ridiculed, dismissed. It will be interesting to see, as universities sustain far more serious fusillades, whether attention will eventually be paid.

What is it about stem cell research that generates so much fraud? There were those Korean dudes, of course (the country even issued a stamp touting their work – which it then disappeared); but there have been quite a few others. Including – reportedly – Bodo-Eckehard Strauer, a massively prolific German scientist who seems to have fudged things like crazy. A group of investigators looked at

48 of the papers from his group and expose[d] a series of problems, including arithmetic errors in the presentation of statistics and identical results in papers presenting different numbers of patients. The authors also searched systematically in all of the papers for discrepant information – pairs of statements that could not both be true.

They document hundreds of errors. For example, in some papers patient groups are said to be randomised, while in others patients with identical outcomes are reported as being non-randomised to treatment and control groups. “And when we ran the statistical tests on the control groups, we found many amazing p values of up to 10-60 and 10-108,” cardiologist Darrel Francis from Imperial College London, one of the study’s co-authors, told Nature.

In a press release, Francis says: “Looking deeper, the seemingly comprehensive and decisive proof of efficacy gradually unravelled … the more we thought about it, the less we could understand.”

Strauer is already under investigation by the University of Düsseldorf.

… from Garrett Park, Maryland.

For starters, it’s insanely humid, but we’re all slogging through it with patriotic smiles. As I write, neighbors are gathering at the end of my driveway. Topics of conversation:

1. Mac v. Non-Mac.

2. The need to start the public school day later around here (some kids have to get up at five AM).

Mr UD now starts reading the Declaration of Independence to us. The shortened version, without the list of complaints.

Ike Leggett’s blue-shirted army just marched by and got hell from one of my neighbors. On the issue just mentioned. (Leggett is Montgomery County Executive, and he’s running for reelection.)

Whoa. Here we go. Sound of sirens! Many labrador retrievers! Here comes the fire truck! Kensington Volunteers, Garrett Park being too petite (Melissa Mader, my neighbor, suggested “petite”) for its own fire department… Boy Scouts followed by Girl Scouts! Babies in colorful colors! MUSIC!!! MUSIC TRUCK. It’s green and has people with instruments on it. The people are playing patriotic marches. Bright yellow vroom vroom with little kid working it. Here’s the Mayor! I tell him I’m writing down everything he says and so he says nothing. Melissa crashes into him.

“Hold up your poster, I don’t understand,” pleads UD as a yellow balloon walks by.

“It’s about summer food. I am corn.”

(The theme of the parade is Summer Fun.)

… that you realize just how beautiful life at big-time sports schools like the University of Florida is. Hushing up the beatings that players mete out around campus is of course business as usual at such places, and only when one of your players goes on, a few years later, to be charged with murder (I wonder if that would have happened if instead of hushing up the guy’s early beatings, the university had taken the behavior seriously… But… you know… he was an important part of the team’s winning record, and there’s a lot of money riding on that record…) do you run the risk of news organizations digging up the hushing up…

Tim Tebow attempted to keep Aaron Hernandez out of trouble during a 2007 bar squabble while both were playing at the University of Florida, but not even the mild-mannered, Bible-toting quarterback could keep the hot-headed tight end from slugging a Gainesville, Fla., restaurant manager and puncturing his ear drum.

Still, after Tebow’s efforts failed, it appears the school or football program might have gotten Hernandez off the hook by reaching a settlement with the manager to keep him from pursuing charges, according to a supplemental investigation report on the altercation obtained by USA TODAY Sports.

Once you’ve learned, courtesy of the University of Florida, that you can get away with breaking someone’s ear drum because he asked you to pay for drinks you bought at his bar, I guess you figure you can get away with anything.

One more glorious tale of collegiate life in America.

UD‘s hometown – the place where she lived from 1963 until she left for college and other adventures, and then returned to in 1995 – is featured in the Washington Post.

… as I do here, there are educational institutions in America that do have pretty universally bad reputations, and these are the for-profits. When a legitimate secondary school or university proposes cooperating with a for-profit, its faculty and students (as in this latest case) often scream NO. Why?

[F]or-profit colleges received $32 billion from the US government in student aid in the 2009-10 academic year. They also charge far higher tuition fees than comparable state universities. Yet they spend much less per student on instruction. Indeed, they typically spend a lot more on marketing their courses than they do on teaching them. This may explain why the majority of students on their degree programmes drop out long before they graduate. In 2008-09 the median length of study for a student at a for-profit university was just four months. The inference is that for-profit universities recruit anyone who is eligible for Federal funds but care little about what happens to them afterwards.

The cynicism and nothingness of the for-profits is now a matter of public knowledge. No one who actually takes education seriously wants to be cheapened by association with these money-grubbers.

… on our way to Rock Creek Cemetery and Gore Vidal’s grave. Georgia is all stop and go traffic and saggy storefronts, a sad landscape in no way helped by the humid morning overcast. Google gives the wrong entrance to the place, so we asked a woman working in her garden how to get in. “Down that alley,” she said, pointing, “and turn left.” Bumpity bumpity down the alley and there it was, the church at the entrance (I sang in its choir one Sunday – a paid gig.).

We saw a big stone with McGOVERN on it and looked more closely. No first name, but next to it was Eleanor’s, and next to hers, Terry McGovern’s. Bette and I both remembered Terry McGovern’s cold drunk death.

We knew Vidal’s grave was near the famous Saint-Gaudens Adams Memorial (watch this with the sound turned down), so we first sat for awhile in front of that. Bette took this picture.

Then began the difficult search for Gore. Section D, steps from the Saint-Gaudens – we knew this much. Also an unusual combination of a long slab and an upright gravestone. We munched the taffy we’d picked up at the cemetery offices, where a nice woman told us Vidal wasn’t in their system yet. I thought of the strange state he was in almost exactly a year after his death – a kind of predigitalized bardo – and how he’d maybe find that amusing. Anyway, I knew if the woman gave us Howard Austen’s location, that would also be Vidal’s. D 48, she said, and she circled the location.

The 48 was no help – Rock Creek Cemetery is not user friendly – but we tromped on, munching, peering, following this lane and that among the boxwood and statuary. Traffic from North Capitol Street streamed by. We were the only visitors, far as we could tell, in the whole place. Just us and two guys digging a fresh grave.

We circled and circled Section D but kept coming up empty; and I said to Bette: “Let’s go. It’s the thought that counts.” And as the Volvo crept away from the D Section I saw it, just curbside, and twenty steps straight downhill from the Saint-Gaudens: An upright stone and a large slab. “Hold on. Stop.”

So I would be able to salute him after all; which I did. I saluted him and I said I know you said love is not your bag, but I love you.

He wrote this, at the end of his memoir:

I’ve… been reading through this memoir, adding, subtracting, writing over half-erased texts, ‘palimpsesting’ – all the while looking for clues not so much to me, the subject, if indeed I am the subject, as to what [my] first thirty-nine years were all about… [on] the small planet that each of us so briefly visits… Finally, I seem to have written, for the first and last time, not the ghost story that I feared, but a love story, as circular in shape as desire (and its pursuit), ending with us whole at last in the shade of a copper beech.

So after all he wrote a love story, the story of his imperishable love for Jimmie Trimble, who was killed in the war and is buried near Vidal, both of them in the shade of a copper beech. Strange to think that his entire life after one passionate encounter with Trimble felt to Vidal partial, unfulfilled in any important way, and that his memoir anticipates the final lying-in that would bring him back to completion.

UD now stood under the beech thinking of all of this, of the way she read Vidal for clues not so much to me, the subject, if indeed I am the subject…